SUSTAINABLE KNOWLEDGE TRANSFORMATION IN, AND THROUGH HIGHER EDUCATION A case for transdisciplinary leadership

Su-Ming Khoo, National University of Ireland, Galway

Whitaker Institute Research DayCluster for Environment, Development & Sustainability

Galway, April 6, 2017

PRESENTATION OVERVIEW

• Overview of IJDEGL 8:3 article (published 31 March) same title

• Unsustainable knowledge? • unsustainable disciplines; death of ‘donnish dominion’ (Frodeman, Trowler)

• HE role found insufficient viz shifting society toward sustainability

• Connecting practical questions about economic, societal and ecological limits and deeper questions about the limitations of academic knowledge

• ‘Projects of sustainability’ - way for HE to begin to experiment with inter and transdisciplinarity.

• 3 modes of transdisciplinarity: • ‘scientific’, dissenting, pragmatic

• transdisciplinarity as co-creation with extra-academic actors; transformative intent

• The case for integral - transdisciplinary leadership

UNSUSTAINABLE KNOWLEDGE

• producing disciplinary academic knowledge for its own sake is an unsustainable practice. Autonomous academic expertise is no longer justifiable on its own terms (Frodeman, 2014).

• HE has contributed too little, even negligibly to the essential goals of transforming the world, failing to lead a transition toward a secure, sustainable future (Shiel & Jones, 2016).

• Critical voices have found higher education leadership to be inhibited in its propensity and capacity to engage systematically in global challenges. Instead, it remains overly focused on short term, organizational goals (Shiel and Jones, 2016:17),

• New practices and concepts of collaborative working, in research (collaboration, inter/transdisciplinarity) and teaching (co-production) are relevant to sustainable futures of HE and society generally

MODES OF TRANSDISCIPLINARITY

• ‘what is between, across, and beyond disciplines’, transcending dichotomous, either/or positions (McGregor, 2015).

• Potentially complementary, or possibly competing

• “Scientific” - Holistic scientific ‘systems’ approaches are appealingly coherent (Jantsch, 1972; Alvargonzalez, 2011)

• “Dissenting” approaches challenge the ‘scientific’ consensus and make concrete demands for social justice - feminist, decolonial, critical race, indigenous (Parker and Samantrai, 2010)

• Neither scientific nor dissenting approaches are sufficient to address ‘wicked problems’ of sustainability

• Pragmatic -more open approach, focusing on bringing together different types of academic and non academic societal actors beyond the academy

ABOUT TRANSDISCIPLINARITY

• ‘Science’ privileges predictability, linearity, dualism, reductionism, exclusive logic and control,

• transdisciplinarity is predicated on complexity, emergence and inclusive logic

• Purpose of co-constructing knowledge is to serve socially relevant and transformative purposes

• missing in complexity of HE transformation is the fundamental transformative motivation - the ‘why’ at the centre of the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ of transformation.

FROM INTER TO TRANSDISCIPLINARITY

• Interdisciplinarity concerns interactions between distinct domains and practices

• Problem focus

• Dissent, Resistance, Transgression

• Transdisciplinarity concerns transcendence of boundaries and knowledge in a transformative mode

Interdisciplinarity A

• Disciplines

• Practices: Academic, Practitioner, Management, Administration, Engagement

Interdisciplinarity B

• Theory

• Data

Transdisciplinarity C

Co-production

Emergent, contested

Educational Ethics

Social Justice

Chaos of

the

disciplines

CONNECTING THE LIMITS AND LIMITATIONS TO HE LEADERSHIP & TRANSFORMATION

• interdisciplinary topics for research, learning and public consultation open up opportunities to re-integrate and re-orient higher education’s research, teaching and engagement activities toward sustainability goals.• climate change,

• migration,

• food systems,

• health systems,

• gender equality.

• Complexity (‘wickedness’) - struggles over what constitutes legitimate knowledge are unavoidable

• HE should focus on practical conduct of transdisciplinarity as inclusive, critically reflexive learning practice.

DOING INTER/TRANSDISCIPLINARITY

• What might inter/transdisciplinarity be doing (beyond what it has been doing)?• Beyond multi/ pluri

• Principle of Included middle - epistemic openness/ humility

• Transformative - pragmatic: addressing concrete ‘wicked’ problems by working collaboratively/ through dialogue.

• Emphasises collaborative processes, emergence

• Focuses on competences: good facilitation and integral leadership

• Transformative challenge to accepted assumptions about ‘fields’ –disciplines, practices, problems, “things”

• Translanguaging – perspective from linguistics• Shared responsibility• Multimodality• Negotiation• Unexpectations

COLLABORATIVE INTELLIGIBILITY ( C. JORDAO)

TROUBLING HE RESEARCH IMAGINARIES

• Dearth of ‘meta-thinking about higher education’ in HE research (Barnett, 2014, p. 9) and lack of a theoretical framework for thinking about higher education educationally (Barnett, 1990).

• A learning approach: initiate more dynamic and theoretically adequate discussions about internationalizing HE • Beyond only describing a diversity of higher education phenomena and

settings,

• To learning from such diversity and difference (eg Khoo & Torres, forthcoming).

• History of the present troubles contemporary understandings of global HE, its entangled histories and inequalities

REFERENCES AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

• Open Access article

• http://ingentaconnect.com/contentone/ioep/ijdegl/2017/00000008/00000003/art00002

• Keynote: International Conference on Gender in higher learning institutions, DUCE 26-29 April

• “Sustaining or transforming higher education? Transformative agendas for gender equality and other SDGs”

• EERJ and EJHE Special Issues 2017 [4 papers in preparation]

• Khoo/Torres chapter on transactional v transformational HE [Ed E. Martin; OUP Symposium in press];

• forthcoming papers on NUIG dataset with R. Susa